Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII

"War Communism", the Red Terror, and Lenin's Famine

Almost immediately after they seized power, Lenin's Bolsheviks inaugurated
an endless stream of economic decrees and policies. These proved to be
disastrous, resulting in a horrific famine, depopulation of the cities,
and an enormous decline in living standards. So unpopular were these
policies that after they were finally altered in mid 1921, Lenin tried to
re-write their history. It was at this point that the Bolsheviks economic
policies from 1918-1921 were dubbed "War Communism," and declared to have
been a temporary expedient forced upon Lenin's government by wartime
conditions. In fact, so-called "War Communism" began before serious
fighting erupted, and continued after the Whites had been decisively
defeated. It was not a wartime expedient; it was the policy that Lenin
wanted to pursue in war or peace. As Pipes explains, "War Communism as a
whole was not a 'temporary measure' but an ambitious and as it turned out
premature attempt to introduce full-blown communism." (The Russian
Revolution) As noted earlier, Lenin's ideas on desirable economic
policy were vague at best. So upon taking power, he looked around the
world for inspiration; what caught his eye was the "War Socialism" of the
German Kaiser. As Paul Johnson notes:

So one might say that the man who really inspired Soviet economic planning
was Ludendorff. His "war socialism" certainly did not shrink from
barbarism. It employed slave-labourers. In January 1918 Ludendorff broke
a strike of 400,000 Berlin workers by drafting tens of thousands of them
to the front in "labor battalions." Many of his methods were later to be
revived and intensified by the Nazis. It would be difficult to think of
a more evil model for a workers' state. Yet these were precisely the
features of German "war socialism" Lenin most valued. (Modern Times)

Near universal nationalization of manufacturing; widespread
nationalization of retailing

Stringent price controls upon and forced requisitioning of
agricultural products; state monopoly on grain purchases

Forced labor for civilians as well as the military

The package fit together quite logically. The tax system had broken down,
so the Bolsheviks just turned on the Czar's printing pressing to fund their
activities. At the same time, the prices of most goods were fixed, so as
the money supply increased without limit, the legal prices became less
and less realistic. Rationing cards replaced rubles as the means of
acquiring goods. But if money no longer bought goods, then what was the
point of working? Hence, the imposition of compulsory labor.

The Bolsheviks' forced labor policies gave new life to the concept of irony.
The men who had proclaimed themselves liberators of the workers and
denounced the exploitation of labor suddenly discovered the joys of serfdom.
Trotsky stood at the theoretical vanguard of the literal proponents of
slavery: "It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that
the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no
other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of
the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force
in accord with the needs of a nationwide economic plan." Initially the
forced labor laws were applied to the (ex-)middle classes, but their
application rapidly broadened to include not only workers and peasants but
even minors. As Pipes explains:

By late 1918, it became common practice for the Bolshevik authorities to
call up workers and specialists for state service exactly as they drafted
recruits into the Red Army. The practice was for the government to
announce that workers and technical specialists in a specified branch of
the economy were "mobilized for military service" and subject to court-
martial: those leaving jobs to which they had been assigned were treated
as deserters... Efforts to organize industrial labor on the military model
could not have worked well in view of the plethora of decrees on this
subject, setting up ever new punishments for "labor deserters," ranging
from publication of their names to confinement in concentration camps.
(The Russian Revolution)

One would expect that the mere suggestion of compulsory labor, let alone its
actual imposition, would have branded Lenin and Trotsky as demonic traitors
to anyone who purported to care about the plight of workers. Ominously,
it did not; Party intellectuals proclaimed the wonders of the new system.
"Compulsory labour under capitalism, wrote Bukharin, was quite the reverse
of compulsory labour under the dictatorship of the proletariat: the first
was 'the enslavement of the working class,' the second the 'self-
organization of the working class'." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times)
At this point, the reluctance of Communists from Marx to Lenin to precisely
explain their proposed policies takes on a new meaning. As the Russian
emigre Ayn Rand put it: "Intellectuals? You might have to worry about
any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: they'll
swallow anything." (Atlas Shrugged)

As the economy deteriorated, the Cheka waxed ever fatter. After an
July 1918 revolt by SRs, the Cheka turned its guns on fellow
socialists, executing 350 captured SR rebels. One month later, the SR
Fanya Kaplan nearly succeeded in assassinating Lenin.
Her noble effort unfortunately gave the Cheka the excuse to initiate the
Red Terror, i.e., mass executions of people based not upon their actions
but their class origins and beliefs. As Landauer explains, "The first
conspicuous act of government-ordered reprisals on a large scale without
regard for individual guilt came after the assassination of Michael Uritzky
and the attempt on Lenin's life on August 30. These events were not in
themselves apt to justify measures against the bourgeoisie, for the two
assassins, Kenigiesser and Fania Kaplan, were both members of the Social
Revolutionary party and therefore not "bourgeois." But the minds of the
Soviet leaders were dominated by the theory that Social Revolutionaries and
Mensheviks were tools of the "class enemy," and it appeared logical to the
Bolsheviks to strike at the group which allegedly had inspired the
assassination.
Five hundred hostages were shot in reprisal in Petrograd
alone by order of Zinoviev, the head of the local soviet. On September 5,
the people's commissars officially legalized the red terror..."
(European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)

From then on the Cheka's executions never ceased. The exact number
murdered is usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the
chaotic wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult.
But execution was not
the Cheka's only tool; it also pioneered the development of the modern
slave labor (or "concentration") camp. Inmates were generally frankly
treated as government-owned slaves, and used for the most demanding sorts
of work - such as digging arctic canals - while receiving pitifully small
rations. As Pipes explains, "Soviet concentration camps, as instituted in
1919, were meant to be a place of confinement for all kinds of undesirables,
whether sentenced by courts or by administrative organs. Liable to
confinement in them were not only individuals but also 'categories of
individuals' - that is, entire classes: Dzerzhinskii at one point proposed
that special concentration camps be erected for the 'bourgeoisie.' Living
in forced isolation, the inmates formed a pool of slave labor on which
Soviet administrative and economic institutions could draw at no cost."
(The Russian Revolution) The number of people in these camps
according to Pipes was about 50,000 prisoners in 1920 and 70,000 in 1923;
many of these did not survive the inhuman conditions.

The mildest manifestation of the Red Terror was the official policy
excluding "class enemies" entirely from the wartime rationing system; i.e.,
legally, it was often impossible for disfavored groups to even purchase
food. As Landauer simply puts it: "As a consequence, the average
"bourgeois" had only the choice between death and illegal activities."
(European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)
Bourgeoisie with valued technical training could usually get around these
rules, but otherwise their plight - and the plight of their families - was
bleak indeed, though naturally far better than the inmates of the slave
labor camps.

It is now and only now, when in the regions afflicted by the famine
there is cannibalism and the roads are littered with hundreds if not
thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) pursue the
acquisition of [church] valuables with the most ferocious and merciless
energy, stopping at nothing in suppressing all resistance.
V.I. Lenin

But the greatest crime committed by Lenin's regime was the civil war the
Soviet government waged against the peasantry, and the famine this war
precipitated. The alliance of "the workers and peasants" was an ingenious
slogan given the fact that almost everyone in Russia was a peasant. But
it was a slogan that Lenin and his followers never had the slightest
intention of following. They despised the peasants as ignorant "petty
bourgeoisie" who stood in the way of collectivized agriculture. With one
hand Lenin's regime legally recognized the peasants' land seizures, but
with the other hand it demanded food at ever more unreasonable terms
(in the end, unrestrained printing press finance plus price controls
effectively required peasants to give their food away for free).
"The law provided that all the grain that the producer had left over after
satisfying his personal needs and providing for seed belonged to the state
and had to be sold to its agencies at fixed prices." (Richard Pipes,
The Russian Revolution) The consequences were a perfect illustration
of the principles of "bourgeois" economics: with ever stricter price
controls, peasants opted not to sell their grain to the cities. This made
life ever harder for urban workers, who fled back to the country in huge
numbers - often city populations declined by over 50%. Rather than repeal
its price controls, the Bolshevik regime scapegoated black marketeers and
speculators, unleashing the Cheka upon them with orders to administer
summary executions. This merely drove up black market prices.

So Lenin's government advanced to the next stage: sending the Cheka and the
Red Army to seize grain directly from the peasant. This was ideologically
justified by dubbing peasants who resisted grain as wealthy "kulaks," though
rich and poor alike found themselves staring down the muzzles of the
Cheka's guns. Once again, the resort to ever greater brutality did not
bring the desired results. Minimal food was collected, and the peasants
went into open revolt. Lenin, who in every other matter seemed to be the
master of the temporary compromise, could not control his hatred of the
resisting peasants. He ordered kulaks to be deprived of not only surplus
grain, but even seed grain, while in his speeches he exhorted:
"Merciless
war against the kulaks! Death to them." Even as the Red Army battled
Kolchak and Denikin, they waged a less visible civil war with the peasants.
By most estimates
several hundred thousand peasants were killed as a result of this so-called
"Bread War" - as usual, the Red Army and the Cheka executed not only
captured rebels, but often families, friends, or entire villages associated,
however vaguely, with counter-revolution.

The peasants had numbers on their side, and many soldiers were reluctant
to fight them, but the government's superior organization ultimately gave
them victory over the peasants.
But the victory was hollow, for after
the fruit of their labor had been seized, farmers generally decided there
was no point in growing a surplus. Moreover, since seed grain was often
taken, many peasants were unable to grow surplus crops even if they wished.
When the perverse incentives of price controls and expropriation were
mixed with a drought, the result was one of the great disasters of the
century: the Russian famine of 1921.
Official Soviet reports admitted that
fully 30 million Soviet citizens were in danger of death by
starvation. The White forces shared little of the blame: as Pipes notes,
the Civil War was essentially over by the beginning of 1920, but Lenin
continued his harsh exploitation of the peasantry for yet another year.
Moreover, the areas under White control had actually built up a food
surplus. The horrific famine of 1921 was thus much less severe in
1920, because after the reconquest of the Ukraine and other White
territories, the Reds shipped the Whites' grain captured grain north to
Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities with less hunger but more political
clout. Low estimates on the deaths from this famine are about
3 million; high estimates go up to 10 million - which would probably have
been much higher if not for foreign relief efforts which Lenin had the
good sense to permit. For perspective, the last severe famine in Russia
hit in 1891-92, and cost about 400,000 lives.

Needless to say, Lenin had no plans to respect the freedom of religion.
But until the famine, most of the persecution of religion appears to have
been taken on local initiative.
Most religious property was ordered
expropriated, although in fact clergymen usually continued to occupy and
use their church buildings. Parents lost the right to give their children
religious education - although again, during the Civil War years, this does
not seem to have been enforced. (Interestingly, while the state subsidies
to the church greatly declined, the Orthodox Church under Lenin essentially
remained a bureau of the state). Serious government persecution of the
Orthodox Church began with the famine, which gave Lenin the
chance to bring the Orthodox Church into line.
He demanded that the Church hand over
valuable relics to help famine victims (or so he said). The Church
resisted, resulting in around 8000 executions of persons resisting the
confiscation of relics. Similar but milder persecution began against
Jews, Catholics, and to a lesser extent, Muslims. (These religions, however,
had less to lose than the Orthodox Church, because they had no subsidies
for the Bolsheviks to cut off).

Can Lenin and his associates be held morally culpable for the deaths of
these millions of famine victims? If the famine were a natural catastrophe,
this would be unreasonable. But the famine was largely man-made, the
result of draconian price controls and requisitioning. Most of the
evidence is that Lenin and his associates knew the probable results of
their agricultural policies, but were willing to take the risk: according
to Pipes, Lenin repeatedly said that he would sooner the whole nation
die of hunger than allow free trade in grain. In short, Lenin and his
comrades knew with substantial certainty that their policies would
cause widespread death from starvation. Under any sensible
definition of murder, this makes Lenin the murderer of millions.